Uncle Bob Martin (@unclebobmartin): "I’m significantly older than you. I started coding in the late 60s. My current strategy is to not read any of the code written by my agents. That’s the only way I can take advantage of their productivity. What I do instead is to surround the agents with extreme constraints. Unit tests, gherkin tests, QA procedures, quality metrics, mutation testing, test coverage, and a plethora of others. In the end, I have very high confidence in the code they produce because they’ve had to run the gauntlet of all of my constraints and tests." | XCancel
Ori Pomerantz@ori_pomerantz
Jul 22
I am trying to use Claude to help me write something, but I just don't feel comfortable letting it edit my files. Does anybody else feel the same? If I am responsible for code, I NEED to understand it, psychologically if for no other reason.
Started programming in 1983. Old?
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Uncle Bob Martin
@unclebobmartin
17h
Replying to @ori_pomerantz
I’m significantly older than you. I started coding in the late 60s. My current strategy is to not read any of the code written by my agents. That’s the only way I can take advantage of their productivity. What I do instead is to surround the agents with extreme constraints. Unit tests, gherkin tests, QA procedures, quality metrics, mutation testing, test coverage, and a plethora of others. In the end, I have very high confidence in the code they produce because they’ve had to run the gauntlet of all of my constraints and tests.
Jul 23, 2026 · 11:44 AM UTC
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Wahyu
@WahyuCodes
9h
Replying to @unclebobmartin @ori_pomerantz
i am trying to do the same exact things, I am curious, what deterministic tools you can recommend for quality metrics? because that is such a non deterministic thing to measure.
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Uncle Bob Martin
@unclebobmartin
8h
GitHub.com/unclebob/crap4jav….
GitHub - unclebob/crap4java: Crap analyzer for my java projects.
Crap analyzer for my java projects. . Contribute to unclebob/crap4java development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
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monkeypatch@m0nkeypatch
17h
Replying to @unclebobmartin @ori_pomerantz
While you're ensuring product quality through testing, what about the quality of the code itself? Lately I have been wondering, that does it even matter anymore, now that changing code is so cheap and easy? Or am I missing something?
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Uncle Bob Martin
@unclebobmartin
15h
I think it matters still, and I think it matters a lot. Messy code slows my agents down. I've seen them wrangle with their own messes without resolution. I finally had to step in and untangle their own mess. So I don't let them create those tangles. I constrain the hell out of function sizes, cyclomatic complexity, and test coverage. That seems to keep them moving smoothly.
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more replies
Prahlad Yeri@prahladyeri
16h
Replying to @unclebobmartin @ori_pomerantz
By doing so, you've trapped yourself into the Chinese room argument. If the LLM generates all the code and you're merely testing it with constraints, then are you really the engineer (Chinese translator) here?
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Uncle Bob Martin
@unclebobmartin
16h
I am the engineer because I am accountable.
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Daniel Redding@theRedding
9h
Replying to @unclebobmartin @ori_pomerantz
What’s your favorite type of thing to have them build?
I don’t know any coding but so far I’ve got a personal context social media app, a semantic suggestion writing and notes app, and an IR remote made from an ESP32 that is controlled by Siri.
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Uncle Bob Martin
@unclebobmartin
8h
Mostly games and tools.
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Marko@MarkoVelich
9h
Replying to @unclebobmartin @ori_pomerantz
Works fine until they start changing tests :)
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Uncle Bob Martin
@unclebobmartin
8h
That’s why we overload the tests with mutation testing, QA procedures, gherkin tests, and so on. It’s not just one test they have to change. it’s a lot of tests. And that makes it harder to change the tests.
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Repojournal
@repojournal
8h
Replying to @unclebobmartin @ori_pomerantz
If we cannot trust the outcome of what AI makes and AI has proven over and over again that it will not listen to us at all times what gives us the confidence that it will stay within the guardrails of our constraints just because we asked it to?
If AI simply makes the judgement call to change the test to what it wants or to have false positives how do we know?
Hidden in between the test checks, haven’t we seen bugs where test pass and QA passes too?
In our writing of code how many times have we seen cases where our assumptions simply turned out to be wrong and we need to take a different direction entirely. How do we handle these sorts of cases with AI?
Are comfortable walking in a future where we cannot say what a software does? We cannot say a software does something simply because the test we...